If you look at how the USA has progressed, the south is STILL stuck in certain trends that affect current day society. It’s why they’re the bible belt, but states like Arizona and California aren’t reffered to as “the south”.
Geographically it makes no sense. California, Arizona, New Mexico, they’re all geographically south, but that’s not what that means.
And racism in the south is just so much more amplified than it is in other states. When you think about it, the 1860s are not THAT long ago in terms of societies.
I think we’re still being affected by actions from those times. A family experiences hardship. So they raise their kid to not trust those that caused it. And that kid grows up and does the same. Without a break in the chain, it just perpetuates more of the same.
So we’re only about 8 generations removed from that time. It’s really not that much. And OBVIOUSLY slavery is going to cause racism.
But what if the slaves were left on Africa, and the plantation owners just had automated drones that did all the work?
What would racism today look like?
Racism existed before slavery. It just changes focus and details in different places at different times. Might not be “race” based in the way we have today, based in arbitrary skin color lines, but prejudice against a given group absolutely is a human failing.
Slavery was as much a product of racism as it was a generator of the current brand of racism that exists in the US. Well, slavery in this context, I’m not well enough versed in older forms to be confident in how much of those were built on the same kind of prejudice. For all I know, Roman slaves may not have been taken based in prejudices the way Africans in specific were during the cross Atlantic slave trade. But those Africans were absolutely considered lesser before the trade got going. And that was absolutely a major factor in the slave trade’s origins.
Robots, you might have reduced or eliminated the slave trade, but it wouldn’t have done a damn thing about racism. There’s always some group that’s going to be a target, and the sheer arrogance of European colonizers would have found even more emphasis on anti-native racism than what they had to begin with. Or the Irish, or the Chinese, or whoever else ended up being at the bottom of their perceived scale of humanity.
You won’t see the end of racism until we see the end of race mattering at all, and even then you won’t eliminate the underlying drives that generate racism.